CPOPOnline.ca

Sadly, my French is not good enough to blog in French (or much of anything in French) but I'd love to have a francophone blogger join us. If you or your group have things to say about issues in psychosocial oncology and you can say it in French, please contact us at  cpop@dal.ca and we'll get you set up.

We are so excited! After much work over the past few months, and feedback at our CPOP workshop, we are now ready to ask for your help in building this site. We'd like you to go to the 'Survey' link on our front page (on the left) and fill in a brief (and I do mean brief) survey of our site.

It is time now to start evaluating CPOPonline. Our funder, CPAC, wants this information and CPOP is also working on funding for the coming years. We also need your feedback to continue to develop the site. Finally, collecting this information now will help us track our progress as we work together to make this the go to site for the psychosocial cancer community.

This survey was developed after reviewing best practices in website evaluation. Dalhousie University's research ethics board has reviewed it and given us the green light to go ahead.

Thanks to all of you fill out the survey. We will, of course, let you know the results by posting them here once we have them.

Have a good summer everyone!

Lynne


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We have been meeting friends and making new ones at the Canadian Association of Psychosocial Oncology (CAPO) conference in Toronto, which runs until tomorrow. People have been stopping by the booth to chat and bring us up to date on what they've been doing.

Lorna Larsen, president of Team Shan, was just here. The group recently completed its second evaluation (the first is posted here). The results are very positive, Lorna reports. We'll have a link to the new evaluation as soon as it's posted to the Team Shan site. The Calgary initiative included displays at Light Rail Transit (LRT) stations, and since there are LRT stations at the University of Calgary, the information was successful in reaching the target group - young women. The bill for the marketing campaign came to $30,000, which included bus shelters, billboards and the LRT displays.

The conversation veered into Facebook territory; Team Shan has been on Facebook for several years, before the "like" button appeared on Facebook pages. Team Shan has 1,440 members who use the forum and get updates. Researchers also use the Facebook page to invite young women to participate in their studies and to share outcomes. Facebook is updating the "like" button functioning (click for more on Like Button 2.0), and Lorna has asked us to encourage people to "like" them. Done!

Josh Peters just dropped by as well. He's with the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada. The organization has won a CAPO award in support of psychosocial oncology excellence. Well done! Along with several other community-based organizations, Josh will be making a five-minute presentation about his group at the conference tomorrow afternoon.

So we've been meeting and greeting and listening and learning, and having a grand time doing all of that. There's nothing like shaking someone's hands and speaking to them to establish connections. That's what CPOP is all about: connecting. We can do that virtually as well, but seeing people over two days stimulates ongoing conversations and helps people see connections and generate ideas, all of which may not otherwise have happened. Now if we could only find a way to do this virtually, we could get together more often than once a year!

Hi folks!

Welcome to our new site! We'd love to hear from you about what you want on it, what you like and what you don't like!

You may not realize that CPOP has been around now for 6 years, working as a community to help all of us in psychosocial oncology to talk together, work together and create a new way of providing services to cancer patients and their supporters.

Talk to us!

Lynne